Using Creative Commons resources in organizations or publications that still follow the rules of "conventional copyright" is probably more complicated than you expect. These materials generally aren't "free" --either as in beer or as in speech.Instead, they bring with them limitations (and also possibilities) that are quite different from those of copyrighted materials.
 
I deal with these issues in this paper:
 
Using Free and Open Online Resources: Licensing and Collections
 
The purpose of this document is to provide an overview of the “open” or “free” resources and materials available from online collections and providers that may be of significant strategic value to schools, universities and to other organizations with educational mandates, such as museums and archives. The initial sections of this paper describe some of the most basic characteristics of “open source,” or more accurately, “creative commons” licensing for cultural and educational resources. These sections also outline criteria for the inclusion of items in the annotated listing that is provided in the remainder of the document. This listing provides details for a number of recommended collections of resources with alternative licenses, indicating the terms governing their use in each case.
 

Here's an abstract I just submitted to Gert Biesta's conference, Theorising Education, in June.

It is relatively uncontroversial to describe teaching and education as means through which naturally-occurring, biologically-based processes of learning are directed and facilitated to achieve predetermined outcomes. Gert Biesta (2006) and others (e.g. Haugsbak & Nordkvelle, 2007) have labelled such understandings by using the phrase “the new language of learning.” This refers to a vocabulary or discourse that, for example, characterizes “‘teaching’ [as the] ‘facilitation of learning’ [and], ‘education’ [as the] ‘provision of learning opportunities” (Haugsbak & Nordkvelle, 2007, p. 2). The emergence of this language can be attributed to many sources --political, economic, and scientific-- but it clearly has deep roots in the foundational role long granted to psychology in education (in North America, at least). Ramified in the genetic epistemology of Piaget, and in recent constructivist and neurologically-based discourses, this language has also been articulated with special force and economy in recent work in instructional design and technology (e.g., Spector et al 2007) and in the incipient field of the “learning sciences” (e.g., Sawyer, 2006). Typically, the classroom is described in these terms as one “environment” among many in which learning processes can occur, but also one that is deliberately designed to facilitate and even optimize of these processes. Unfortunately, the implications of this language for education in general and teaching in particular are not at all positive. Given that “the objective of education is learning, not teaching,” as one slogan has it, school and pedagogy end up appearing as sub-optimal or even as superfluous means for obtaining such “educational” ends.

This paper makes the case that any choice between natural processes of learning on the one hand and the pedagogical artifice on the other is a manifestly false one. It attempts to delineate the limitations presented by the language of learning by contrasting it explicitly with other understandings of social change and reproduction, above all those from human and social (as opposed to psychological) sciences. These alternative discourses would replace the terminology of “environment” (and an accompanying lexicon of behaviour, adaptation and motivation) with that of the intentional structuring, meanings and histories of a “lifeworld” for which educational elements such as “self-activity” and “developmental preparedness” would obtain (e.g. Friesen & Saevi, 2010). This paper also explores the possibilities presented by replacing “learning” (and its formal and informal variants) with more differentiated understandings of socialization, development and acculturation --phenomena that are historically and culturally embedded, and are not readily reducible to the instrumental logic of means and ends.

References:

Biesta, G. (2006). Beyond learning: democratic education for a human future. Boulder, CO: Paradigm Publishers.

Friesen, N. & Saevi, T. (2010). Reviving Forgotten Connections: Klaus Mollenhauer and Human Science Pedagogy in Canadian Teacher Education. Journal of Curriculum Studies 42.

Haugsbak, G. & Nordkvelle, Y. (2007). The Rhetoric of ICT and the New Language of Learning: a critical analysis of the use of ICT in the curricular field. European Educational Research Journal 6 (1), 1-12.

Spector, J.M., Merrill, M.D., van Merrienboer, J., & Driscoll, M.P. (Eds.) (2007). Handbook of research on educational communications and technology. Mahwah NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.

Sawyer, R.K. (Ed.) (2006). The Cambridge handbook of the learning sciences. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, pp. 567–580.

Special issue of E-Learning and Digital Media, Editor Dr. Norm Friesen / Please Forward as appropriate!

Media today are everywhere. From educational gaming through portable e-texts to cell phones ringing in class, it seems we can’t escape. Nor can we live without media; instead, they form a kind of ecology that we inhabit. In addition, media have an epistemological function; they shape both what we know and how we come to know it: “Whatever we know about our society, or indeed about the world in which we live,” as Niklas Luhman observed, “we know through… media.”

Speaking of media in education suggests a range of possibilities that are different from what is suggested by educational technology (electronic, digital or otherwise). Describing computers and the Internet specifically as digital media casts their role not as mental tools to be integrated into instruction, but as “forms” and “cultures” requiring “literacies” or acculturation. In this way, speaking of media in education brings instructional environments more closely together with the world outside. Explorations of these terms and possibilities have been initiated by the likes of Marshall McLuhan, Neil Postman and Elizabeth Eisenstein, and they are also touched upon in research on media literacies. However, more recent theoretical developments and accelerated mediatic change --from blogging through networked gaming to texting and sexting-- offer innumerable opportunities for further exploration.

This special issue of E-Learning and Digital Media invites contributions that focus on media, particularly digital media, and their ecological and epistemological ramifications. Specific topics may include:

• School and classroom as media (ecologies) and the changing world outside
• Digital challenges to media literacy and literacies
• Media socialization and media education
• Histories of media and education
• The epistemological character of (new) media

Submissions for this special issue are due May 1, 2010

Length of submissions: generally 6000-8000 words

Further submission and formatting information is available at: http://www.wwwords.co.uk/elea/howtocontribute.asp

Direct comments and questions to: nfriesen@tru.ca

Reading Winthrop-Young's Drill and Distraction in the Yellow Submarine: On the Dominance of War in Friedrich Kittler's Media Theory in Critical Inquiry theother day, I came across this provocative passage:

"With the decline of large-scale political activism in Western Europe and North America [terms like “guerilla” or “revolution”] were redeployed elsewhere, in particular within the more militant discourse of liberation of either nature or new information technologies. Information in particular appears to have become the proletariat of the third industrial revolution. It does the work, but it has yet to gain a true understanding of the historical impact of its labor; it enhances the freedom of those who exploit it, but it is itself unfree; it is by nature international, but it remains subject to national constraints. Technological advances may allow it to reproduce, circulate, and suffuse society at ever higher rates, but it depends on committed activists to secure its liberation.

"Once the chains imposed by adverse political and technological conditions have been thrown off, however, the new "mode of information" will realize its full potential and yield revolutionary social benefits. Data of the world, unite! You have nothing to lose but your access restrictions. This rhetorical migration from city streets to information highways has been particularly pronounced in North America, where it occurred as part of a large-scale displacement of utopian hopes ofthe sixties from social proj-ects onto new information technologies. The fact that the PC, the web, and early forms of VR technology have managed to attract so many of the aspirations born out of the consciousness-raising campaigns of the sixties has resulted in some family resemblances between the ways in which cyber-prophets of today talk about the communal and emancipatory potential of a wired world and their parents' discourse on social reform. The most conspicuous example of this move from Haight-Ashbury southward to Silicon Valley may have been Timothy Leary's well-publicized career switch from drugs as media to media as drugs; the most flagrant is the way in which multimillion-dollar software companies flaunt their adherence to the past ideals of Californian counterculture. This "soft" version, as it were, of the genealogical link between flower and browser power was accompanied by a transfer of the more martial tropes of self-stylization mentioned above. Starting in the late seventies and early eighties, popular culture became at-tuned to the image of the outlaw hacker, the lonely warrior or techno-guerillero in the war zone of codes and data who, rather than liberating the working class or the Third World is engaged in a struggle against the regime of IBM, Microsoft, the NSA, or any other force bent on restricting access to, or limiting the movement of, information.

Thinking of the manifestos (Cluetrain, or Barlow's "Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace") and other pronouncements/predictions about the revolutionary promise of data and networks, one is led to wonder. Why motivates or authorizes the association of revolutionary language with data and information technology? Is it a good thing or a bad thing that this shift has occurred? What events might drain data of this potential, as happened with the proletariat?

Over the last 10 years, the status of educational metadata, specifically as they relate to learning objects, has changed radically. In the heady days of the turn of the millennium, learning objects and their metadata were seen as being “destined to forever change the shape and form of learning;” by 2007, this approach has been derisively labeled “industrialist,” and said to be quickly running “out of steam.” Given such drastic changes, how are metadata to be understood in the context of different and emerging approaches to online learning resources, above all those labelled 'open'? This question will be the focus of this presentation by Dr. Norm Friesen, Canada Research Chair in E-Learning Practices at Thompson Rivers University and Director of the CanCore Initiative. Dr. Friesen will consider a number of alternatives to “learning object metadata,” focusing in particular on those presented on the one hand by very informal approaches exemplified by folksonomies and RSS-type metadata, and on the other by the more formalized mechanisms of the semantic Web. Dr. Friesen will conclude his presentation by discussing approaches that incorporate both “high tech” and “low tech” approaches –one that is currently under development as a multi-part international standard under the auspices of ISO (the International Organization for Standardization).

I have been looking into the current status of the Learning Object Metadata, an IEEE standard that was a central focus of my professional life --at least while the CanCore initiative was active.

Projects and writing on the LOM seem to drop off precipitously after around 2006 --right around the time that the term "Open Educational Resources" was coined at a OECD meeting. (See this survey of LOM projects and of the rise of OER/CC licensing in the special OER issue of IRRODL). But this is not based on objective measures; it has much more to do with what one can glean based on the last time a site was updated, or an article was posted or published.

At the same time, though, I say a tiny note at the bottom of a page at the IEEE site (and had this confirmed by Erik Duval) that the IEEE LOM has been reaffirmed by the IEEE --in May of 2009. It will be an international standard for at least 5 more years.

This left me wondering: If this describes the de jure status of the IEEE LOM as a standard, is there information --other than musing and gleanings-- about its status as a de facto standard?

So I decided to look up a few search terms on Google insights, and the results are illuminating.

The flash graph below shows I got when I keyed in "learning object metadata," "cancore" and "open educational resources."

While hardly definitive of "interest" (as Google might lead one to believe) --and while OER and the LOM are obviously not mutually exclusive-- the trendlines represented in this chart provide some grounds for speculation...

This is a screen capture (due to variations in Google's data). See "live" Google insight data here.

Check out this slideshare for a presentation I recently gave at the annual conference of the German Society for Media Studies. You can also download the full-text version as well.

Abstract: Next to media themselves, pedagogy or education --configured specifically as a “training the senses” (McLuhan & Leonard, 1967) or “sensuous education” (McLuhan, 1964)-- is one of the most prominent themes in McLuhan’s corpus. It is the focus of numerous articles published throughout his career and of two significant albeit relatively obscure monographs that effectively book-end his work on electronic media. As Janine Marchessault says, McLuhan articulates “a specifi cally argued pedagogical enterprise” that is central to his “aesthetically-based, highly performative and historically grounded..contribution to the study of media” (xi, 10, 34). In this paper, I focus on McLuhan’s pedagogical enterprise specifically as it develops from his highly original understanding of the senses. In doing so, I also show how McLuhan’s contribution to media is indeed aesthetically, historically and performatively charged, and make the case for the ongoing currency of his pedagogical enterprise today.